"The one misconception is that the public program is only interested in supporting non-biotech research but nothing could be further from the truth. The public program aims to support biotechnology," Gibbs said.

The public program's only concern is that a private company "would be able to have any type of a stranglehold on the blueprint of life," Gibbs said. "Apart from that, all of this activity is welcome."

A company called Celera in Rockville, Maryland, has been widely criticized for allegedly wanting to do just that. Celera, which denies the accusation, has participated in an ongoing race to complete sequencing the entire human genome before the Human Genome Project does.

Researchers currently have to pay tens of millions of dollars for genetic database subscriptions from biotechnology companies trying to recover their costs of developing the data.

CuraGen, for example, has a US$48 million collaboration with Glaxo Wellcome, a pharmaceutical research company in North Carolina, which gives Glaxo access to all of the information in CuraGen's genomic databases, said Mark Vincent, a CuraGen spokesman.

Lewis Gruber, president and CEO of Hyseq and its wholly owned subsidiary, GeneSolutions.com, said, "We think our biggest customers will be pharmaceutical and biotech companies ... it's a big market in terms of biology and medical research of all kinds."

The GeneSolutions.com site will offer information on the chemical structure of genes, which helps scientists plan their experiments. Researchers can also retrieve data on single nucleotide polymorphisms, or SNPs, which are small variations in genes that can predict predisposition to a disease, or predict how an individual will react to a medication.

Or they can purchase bases. Commonly referred to as the rungs of the DNA ladder, bases often are used to measure the length of a piece of DNA. They cost 10 cents each if the information is already publicly available. If the information is proprietary, the charge is 50 cents a base.

The site also offers a way for genes to be licensed. With a mouse click, a researcher can pay US$10,000 for permission to do what they will with a gene. To prevent the gene information from languishing, such licenses must be renewed annually for an additional $10,000.

If a product, such as a drug, results from the licensed gene, GeneSolutions.com will receive up to 1.5 percent in royalties.

Hyseq is pumping proprietary gene data from more than 12 million DNA samples the company has analyzed into GeneSolutions.com's database. Hyseq said that's more than twice the number reported by any competitor.

Several rare genes are available at GeneSolutions.com, the company said – a result of Hyseq's mining tissues to find genes with expression levels as low as one copy per cell – the type that many researchers believe have the most potential to lead to drugs.